Christopher Buckley - Boomsday

Frank was frankly not overly fond of his stepson, but Lisa kept on him about it, so he eventually adopted Boyd legally-after instructing his lawyers to make certain changes in his will.

On this sparkling California morning, as Frank looked out on his peaceable kingdom and read about events back east, it crossed his mind that this screwball bill of Jepperson and Cass’s could somehow affect RIP-ware, his latest software brainstorm.

RIP-ware was the company nickname for a software program that, if all went according to plan, would make Frank Cohane one of the richest men on the planet. Its actual name was Bio-Actuarial Dyna-Metric Age Predicator (BADMAP), and because of its vast potential, few people outside the company knew about it. Frank had invested a huge chunk of his fortune in it.

It worked this way: A person’s DNA profile, family history, mental history, lifestyle profile, every variable-how many trips to the grocery per week, how many airplane flights, hobbies, food, booze, number of times per month you had sex and with whom, everything down to what color socks you put on in the morning-were all fed into the software. RIP-ware would then calculate and predict how and when you’d die. In the testing, they had programmed it retroactively with the DNA and lifestyle profile of thousands of people who had already died. RIP-ware predicted their deaths with an accuracy of 99.07 percent. In a simulation, it predicted the death of Elvis Presley-just four months from the actual date of his demise. The ultimate “killer app.”

Insurance companies had been working on similar programs. What a windfall it would be for them if they could sell life insurance to someone they knew was going to live another forty years-and conversely decline life insurance to someone the computer predicted would be pushing up daisies within two years.

Another field of vast potential were the old folks’ homes. Typically, these demanded that a prospective resident turn over his or her entire net worth in return for perpetual care. You could live two years or twenty years; that was their gamble. But if a nursing home knew, in advance, that John Q. Smith was going to have a fatal heart attack in 2.3 years while watching an ad for toenail fungus ointment on the evening news, they would much rather have his nest egg as advance payment than that of, say, Jane Q. Jones, who RIP-ware predicted would live another twenty-five years and die at the ripe old age of 105. Frank was already in negotiation with a huge national chain of nursing homes called Elderheaven. The majority shareholder was that fat little pro-life guy Gideon Payne. Cass had just gone after him on that Sunday morning TV show recently. Small world. Meanwhile, RIP-ware was being marketed to companies very discreetly. Its high accuracy was nowhere referred to in company documents. As far as the broader world knew, it was simply “acturial enhancement software that assists companies in certain market sectors with paperwork reduction and simplification.”

But now a United States senator had proposed on the floor of the Senate that Americans should be allowed to decide for themselves when they died-and, morever, be compensated for it by the government. Frank detected a blip on the radar.

He called up the video of Jepperson’s speech on his computer, listened for a few minutes. He studied the face on the screen. Good-looking. A bit effete, aristocratic. You could tell at one hundred yards the guy came from money. More than a little pompous-who did he think he was? Sounded like he was practicing giving his presidential inaugural speech.

And suddenly Frank found himself wondering: Is my daughter screwing this guy?

In one of the last good talks around the family kitchen table that he had with Cass, she had told him that she was still a virgin. She was just eighteen. Then she went off to the military, and then they had the falling-out-in absentia, when she found out about the mortgage-so the two of them had never had the father-daughter talk about…boys.

After the incident in Bosnia, there were hints in the media-more than hints, if you considered one of the tabloid headlines: DID THE EARTH MOVE FOR YOU, TOO, DEAR?-about what they were doing in the minefield in the first place. Then Cass went to work for the guy in Washington. And now here he was championing her national suicide scheme. She had to be sleeping with him.

He tried to shrug it off, but Frank Cohane found himself unaccountably curious.

Had to be.

He certainly had the means to find out. He had Washington connections. Hell, he had the town wired. He was an Owl-a major donor to the party. A big, snowy Owl. He and Lisa had spent a night in the Lincoln Bedroom-doing things that old Abe and Mary Todd Lincoln never dreamed of. They’d sat one row behind the president and Mrs. Peacham at the inaugural parade. They’d been in the presidential box at the Kennedy Center. And once a month, his private line or private cell phone would ring and he’d hear those sweet words: “This is the White House operator trying to reach Mr. Frank Cohane.” And on would come the voice of Bucky Trumble, chief political counselor to the president of the United States, his closest adviser.

The last time he called it was to say, “The president and I were talking about you in the Oval this morning.” The Oval. It was all bullshit, Frank knew. With these political guys, it was almost all bullshit. But high-level bullshit. And ear-pleasing bullshit all the same. And what Bucky had gone on to say was most definitely pleasant: “He’s got you in mind for a significant ambassadorial posting. Don’t let on I told you, okay? He’ll want it to be his surprise.”

Frank had run that one, too, through his bullshit meter. What exactly constituted a “significant” ambassadorial posting? London? Paris? Tokyo? Those were his definitions of significant. Moscow? Dreary. And without a cold war going on, somewhat pointless. You’d go broke trying to sell RIP-ware in a country where the average male died at fifty-seven-of either alcoholism, lung cancer, or a bullet. He did not particularly relish the idea of four years playing wet nurse to a parade of U.S. oil executives looking for preferential leases in the Novaya Zemlya trough.

Ireland? Pointless. Appealing in a way, since his great-grandfather had come over and spent his life working in a coal yard in South Boston. You probably didn’t have to spend too much actual time in Ireland. But then the Irish press would hate you.

He ran it by Lisa that night after some cosmic coitus. (She was working their way through the third edition of The Joy of Sex and had found a position called “la grande morte.”) Her only comment-about the ambassadorship-was, “I wouldn’t have to, like, learn a language or anything?”

That would be one advantage to London or Dublin, Frank considered. Then he thought of all the paperwork. His fellow Owl Steve Metcalf had been nominated to be ambassador to some utterly pointless country in Africa and had spent $150,000 on lawyers filling out the four-hundred-page financial disclosure form-“Please list all stock and securities traded in the last 40 years”-only to be humiliated in front of some grandstanding senator who asked Steve what countries his country shared borders with. Uh…well, Senator, I’m certain that the embassy has people who, uh, stay on top of issues of that, uh, nature. A bit embarrassing, considering that the country was an island. Steve never quite recovered socially.

Frank was in the process of mentally writing off an ambassadorship when his private phone rang. “This is the White House operator…”

“Frank? Bucky Trumble!”

They always managed to announce their names with a little trumpet blast, frank recognition of, and unbridled joy in, their own importance.